“Who would be a scholar? not I, I promise you! My mind always gave me this learning was such a filthy thing, which made me hate it so as I did. When I should have been at school construing _Batte mi fili, mi fili mi Batte_, I was close under a hedge, or under a barn wall, playing at span-counter or Jack-in-a-box. My master beat me, my father beat me, my mother gave me bread and butter, yet all this would not make me a squitter-book. It was my destiny. I thank her as a most courteous goddess, that she hath not cast me away upon gibberish;” and so on, with a diatribe against the divisions of grammar, and parts of speech generally, as forming a portion of “the devil’s Pater-noster.” And yet, out of the accidence, he coins almost his only fragment of wit throughout a play in which he enacts the character of “Chorus.” “Verba dandi et reddendi,” says Will, “go together in the grammar rule; there is no giving but with condition of restoring.” Altogether we obtain fewer ideas of what Will may have been, from Nash, than from Rowley. The former makes him less attractive, and when the jester closes the piece with a “_Valete spectatores_, pay for this sport with a _Plaudite_, and the next time the wind blows from this corner, we will make you ten times as merry,”--we are glad to rejoin, _vale et tu_, and to get away without paying the price asked for sport which, had it been ten times as merry as is vouched for the next play, would not have sinned with excess of mirthfulness. It only remains for me to add, that Will survived to hold office under Edward VI. How he sustained his reputation during a portion of the six years’ reign of that young monarch, I am unable to inform my readers. The only trace I have found of him is in a paper by Bray, in the eighteenth volume of the ‘Archæologia,’ from which we learn, according to a citation from the household expenses, that the sum of twelvepence was paid “for painting Will Somers’ garments.” Before proceeding to the next reign, I will take this opportunity to narrate an anecdote of the learned and skilful diplomatist, Pace,--not because he was the namesake of Pace, the “bitter fool” of Queen Elizabeth’s days, but because the anecdote itself has reference to subjects from which Henry could draw amusement, and that there is an illustration in it, in connection with the court jesters.